Rede. Go back.
I shook my head.
She carefully touched the spot on her forehead where the ibis-hound had tapped her soul. "I am broken," she whispered. "Is this how the void feels? Such emptiness." Her lips tightened. "Such hunger." Her lips moved around the word but she didn't say it.
Qliphoth.
"I have something for you." I lifted her hand from her forehead and pressed my lips to the center of her palm. She smelled like lilacs. Still.
I unfolded the Chorus, and their voices filled my spine and throat. Like an aria rising from my chest, they swarmed up to my mouth where a single voice-a single note-pushed its way to the front of my mouth. I kissed Kat's palm and breathed out the light that had once belonged to her. I closed her fingers around the star in her palm, sealed her hand tight so that it wouldn't escape.
Wait for the light.
She brought her hand to her mouth and kissed her knuckles, feeling the warmth of her soul radiating through her flesh. Her grip loosened and the starlight escaped through the gaps between her fingers. It raced into her eyes, making the welling tears glitter. Racing through the flesh of her skull, the stolen piece of her soul unknotted the twisted skin of the ibis-hound's kiss.
She sighed, a long breath unraveling from the tension that had been bound and wound in her gut. One of the tears launched itself across the curve of her cheek. "What happened?"
"The Hollow Men are gone, and so is the device."
"Gone? Where?"
"I broke them, Kat."
"Goddess, Michael. Why-?" In her eyes, the rest of the question. Pleading me to tell her otherwise, to tell her that I didn't have their blood on my hands.
"It was the only way I knew."
Another tear started across her cheek. "What price have you paid for me?"
"It was a debt owed." I shook my head. "What I gave away I had kept for too long. It didn't belong to me."
She had Seen the glow of the refreshed Chorus on me-the sons of morning-but she didn't know who they were, who they had been. John Nicols was in there, as was the tiny remnant of Bernard du Guyon. The one glittering particle of his spirit that had not been given as sacrament. He would never complete his journey. Not while I lived. There were others as well, voices I did not know. They filled my head with a different song.
Other than Bernard, the new voices were, for a lack of a better word, volunteers.
"Do you remember that phrase attributed to Descartes? Do you remember what he said? 'I think, therefore I am.' "
Her eyebrows pulled together and she sat up, propping her elbows into her pillows. "Yes, I remember it. Cogito ergo sum. What does that have to do with anything?"
"Everything," I said. "Nothing."
She laughed. "Are you pulling my leg? 'Everything' and 'Nothing' are the non-answers of the world."
I put a finger to my lip and snared her laughter in a circle of finger and thumb. "Maybe." She stared, lost in the suggestion hidden within the formed circle. "But what if Descartes' phrase was the Word spoken by God that started Creation?"
When she blinked again, I had vanished. Like a dream. Like an illusion.
Maybe this was the way the world began.
Ergo sum.